Dec 06, 2020

It was a glorious Saturday

We woke up to frost yesterday  Actually day three of frost. We are not getting any sun on the front of our house as it faces north and because it is so tall and the sun is lower in the sky, the frost does not melt. Between the shale and the Jeep on the driveway, as well as all that white out front onto the road we now have a large icy patch.

Surprise visitor yesterday noonish. A Northern Flicker visited and sampled a few berries. It is difficult to a make out his red facial markings as they blended in with the berries but I did see them. He did not want to have his photo taken.

I assume that it was his spouse who flew over to the suet hanging on our large tree. She had a good feed before flying off.

It was the fourth day in a row of walking for me ( finally I am back on track ). It takes a bit of time to suit up for the weather. My thumb is holding socks that I fit over my long johns and above that I am showing my next layer, fleece pants. Then comes a scarf, my ear muffs and warm gloves. I’m on my third pair trying to find the warmest.  Most days my thinsulate ones work fine. Soon I may have to wear a pair of mittens on top of them. Last thing was to zip up my jacket and we were off.

While I was layering on my going outside outfit, Colin simply put a leather coat over his shorts and off he went. Yes he is still wearing shorts and he gets all kind of comments about it. Here he is sprinkling some of that special sidewalk salt to create a safe path for us out to the far side of the road where it is dryer. We are being ever so careful and I hang onto his arm. It is icy where the sun does not shine.  Not sure that I would feel comfortable walking without him. We had no idea that this happened to our driveway and front of the house along the road, another first.

Some neighbours have been putting out holiday decorations. We have not yet been outside after dark to take it all in. However some are pretty enough to share even with the lights off.

Most unique. We will be sure to check this out one night. The red letters on the deer spell BELIEVE.

The flamingo lives in front of this home year round. The mask was added several months ago.  Now they have added antlers, a scarf and a colourful gift and lights. For sure we will be checking this display out once the sun sets.

There I am in full walking gear. The hedge is along the side of this home and is decorated all the way around to the front where they have quite a few decorations going on, maybe just a bit too much but I bet it looks great in the dark.

They have four or five of these lovely looking lanterns hanging among other decorations.

I so enjoyed seeing all the decorations even without the lights. We saw one older gentleman, new to the park, putting up a string of lights. I told him that it was going to look so pretty. He preened, we told him that we would be back to check it out at night. Big smile. I have to say that there are many who have not decorated at all which surprises me but then they have their reasons, perhaps too much effort. It is obvious that some have flown south to a warmer climate but there are many still here. Each one of these have a large shovel sitting next to the front door. Another first for us to see the park at this time of year. I so wish that I had dozens of extra strings of lights and like a good fairy I would go about putting them up for the older people in the park. However then I would need extension cords and of course there is the matter that perhaps not everyone can afford to pay the extra electricity of those Christmas lights.

Many here have been collecting food and toys and even turkeys for the local food bank. Sadly that has just been stopped because of  our new two week Covid lock down. They are suggesting a financial donation instead. I think it has something to do with those who are collecting and those who are delivering to the food bank and those who are there to receive the donations, too much person to person contact. Hopefully what has been collected will be kept until it can be delivered.

My reflective sunset to the east, last evening.

Toady was our fifth walk, also the last day I have to wear a compression stocking 😀 However today was also the last day of sunshine. The forecast ahead is for clouds for the next week. There is a possibly of snow which is exciting – well at least for those us, who get to stay home and not have to drive anywhere. Who knows when we will see another sunset 🙁

This is a brilliant idea. We can all do this now and if your food bank is not open, keep your items until it is.

In case you missed it, be sure to check out the first picture on my last post. A very special sunrise, not to be missed.

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec 05, 2020

Amazing start to the day

The sun wasn’t up over the hills yet this morning. I went online to Castanet and found this beautiful sunrise. “Just after 7AM, Gail Bastow snapped a particularly beautiful photo from Winfield Flats, where the red sky was complemented by misty morning fog and frozen ground.”  I could not believe how perfect this photo was.

Then I saw this on my friend Cindy’s FB page. She also took a great photo.

I must be looking in the wrong direction because the sun only came up just after 9AM and this is what I saw.

Isn’t photography marvellous. You don’t have to be there, yet you can still enjoy the beauty of the moment.

Special thanks to my friends in Edmonton ( Jannose & Colin ) who posted this on their FB page tonight.  A stunning sunset.

Mother Nature never ceases to amaze me.

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Dec 03, 2020

Last weekend ended up being a busy time

Good thing I try to remember to take photos so that I won’t forget the que pasa of it all.

The forecast or weather guessers as George used to say, said that the weekend would be the last two warmish days for a long while. The time had come for us to pick the last of our veggies before we entered a deep freeze.

This is the second planting of carrots and we did pretty good harvest wise.

A few days later Colin cleaned them outside and then scrubbed them inside at the sink. They are so sweet.

I was surprised to find even more beets tops. They just kept growing after I last picked them, before the first frost. We have enough for two meals of steamed greens.  Yummy!

Not as many beets as I expected. I suspect that there was not enough heat for them to grow. Next summer I will start to do the second planting right away as I harvest the first crop. I unnecessarily waited several weeks this past summer.

Colin cleaned the gutters that were full of leaves.

I did my third raking of the season. The rake is against the first tree-hard to see with the shadow. We still have leaves on our trees. First time we have ever been here to see how many leaves fall. I did find out from our lawn guy that we have been charged over the years for both fall and spring clean up.  Now I know why.

Just at dusk Colin decided to take a few photos of our outdoor lights.

Can you see the Christmas tree inside? Left corner of the house. So many neat reflections.

Left over fortune cookies from the other night. Those who really know me are shaking their heads and saying “please no, you are already direct enough”.

First time that we have had living plants in our home here. My garden is in Mexico. I neglected to water my $5.00 poinsettia and it shrivelled up. Right now I have some red flowers but the leaves have fallen off.

I am now on my second Christmas cactus. Many years ago I grew these and they looked fabulous at Christmas. Now the buds have dropped off.

Any suggestions? These are dried up buds on the first cactus.

All the lights are giving me a mental boost.

One of my longtime readers, Janet, suggested Blackwell Dairy Farm for the best ever eggnog. This is the link for where they sell their products in my area of B.C.  https://www.blackwelldairy.com/products-purchase-locations If you check that link you will find where they sell in your particular area. Muchas gracias Janet.

 

 

 

 

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Dec 01, 2020

Really, December 1st! How did that happen?

November passed in a blur. All because of the fence, I guess. I’m not quite ready for December. I had visualized a few weeks of just laying about reading. I have had some eggnog here and there. Lovely stuff, especially after an absence of 20 years. So far I prefer adding brandy rather than rum, but then I am not fussy. So what type of eggnog do you prefer? Here in Canada we have totally different grocery stores than you do in the US. So far here in BC I have only found Dairyland 😕  Original or Classic? Is there anything better?

In addition to eggnog we have been indulging in a lovely Christmas cake. I purchased this from a lady here in the park that bakes and sells her creations. She is the one we got bread and other goodies from last April and May. All were delicious, so we decided to invest $20.00 in her dark fruit cake.  It was very very tasty but hopefully mine will be a tad better.

Surprise. We woke up to a frozen lake this morning.

It was a lovely sunny day with temps of 4C/39F.

But the lake was frozen. It was all lovely liquid water yesterday. So surprised to see the ice today. How can it happen so fast?  Nothing that I could see melted today.

Frosty cold.

Yesterday I had my last vein treatment, at least 60 injections based on the cotton balls and tape.  Three treatments on each leg within a 12 month period. The earliest I can start again is September 2021. No one knows if we will be traveling again by then. If we can we will still try and get to Egypt. It all depends on rules and requirements for travel. I think I will be delaying my next vein treatments to April of 2022. That way if we can’t fly anywhere, we will hopefully be able to drive to Mexico and stay there as long as we can.

Cindy, a good friend here in the park, snapped this photo a day or so ago. She captured two trumpeter swans and their cygnet swimming behind them.  I so hope that this is the same family I got photos of a few weeks ago. It would be great if that family had reunited.

Cindy took this from far away.  Great zoom on her latest iPhone. The cygnet is between the adults.

The patterns of ice are most interesting.

A quick peek of our tree and small buffet display with some of our cutsies.

Trying to show the tree reflections in the windows.

This was taken two days ago on Sunday the 29th. Simply spectacular.

I was rather surprised today when the sun went behind the mountain at 3:00PM. Suddenly it was darker and by 4:30PM it was dark. I guess we surely are in December.

Tonight as I was writing this I heard geese overhead. How can they land on the lake in the dark?  What happens when they are expecting water but they hit ice 😯

 

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Nov 29, 2020

Fence and related issues resolved

Tuesday mid morning we had a meeting with our financial advisor. Sadly he is permanently retiring, he was semi retired and had kept us on for the past two years.  News to us that was rather unexpected. He invited us and his admin ( who is also retiring ) for lunch at the Kelowna Yacht Club.

We all wore masks until seated and we were appropriately distanced because of the large table. Just after this photo was taken Colin’s phone rang.  It was maintenance giving us notice that they were going to be working on our property. We had been told on Monday that we would get at least one days notice, before they started digging. We just got a one minute notice! So we ate quickly and drove home.

This was taken from the car as we came down our street. Where were the workers. No one was digging.

Oh but they were, on the other side of the fence! But why I asked. Well they just thought it might be easier to start there. This was our first indication that the fence might be in the way. Colin spent hours laying new landscape cloth and levelling his cement slabs to match the concrete. I mentioned before that our plan is to push the shed closer to the fence in the spring.

Quite late in the afternoon they started to dig on the correct side of the fence. Ever so carefully they pushed back the rocks and removed the landscape cloth.

They set out tarps and very carefully shovelled the under layer of small rock on one side and the dirt on the other. It looked very neat but I figured that would not last. It turned out that I was correct.

They left at 4:30PM as it was starting to get dark. At this point we had no idea what was going to happen the next day, on Wednesday. Needless to say I was upset at my yard being dug up. Colin was more like ” nothing we can do about it” and decided to put the tree up and sort out the branches. My heart was not into Christmas but after a glass of wine I redid what he had done and fine tuned it a bit, bending branches here and there. We took no photos as we were still dazed from all the unexpected activity. Neither of us can remember if we put the tree lights up Tuesday or Wednesday. We do recall the Colin made creme of leek soup from a Knorr package.

Later I read and enjoyed eggnog with rum and a piece of banana bread.

Wednesday was all about digging and more digging. Before noon they knew that there was a five foot diameter concrete top that went under the fence to the second hole on the other side of the fence. Fortunately the found a smaller diameter opening and eventually were able to get it open.

There was a lot of rock, mud and some twigs.There was no sign of a pipe coming from the drain in the road. So they started to remove the mud and rocks. They were gone a good part of the day but came back to do more digging. Lots of breaks and a one hour lunch. At the end of the day they said that in the morning ( Thursday ) they might need to remove the fence including the steel posts and the cement used to keep them in place. Again more shocking news.

I did contact our fence builder and he was not available to come until Friday. So we decided that no one was going to take our fence apart except the builder.  Meanwhile I started to put out some of our Christmas cutsies. Things that were not going on the tree.  Thinking back as I type this, I am pretty sure that we did put up the tree lights Tuesday. However neither Colin nor I can recall what we had for dinner Wednesday night. Our minds remained in turmoil.

When they left for the day they once again said that they were not sure what would happen with the fence the next day. They still had not found the pipe.

 

Thursday morning was spent making the hole deeper. They took away two loads of rock. Paul is actually standing in the hole.  They tried using a shop vac to suck the mud.  Took about two minutes for it to clog.

Having removed a good deal of rock they tried an experiment. Insert water into the pipe within the drain.

And water began to run into the hole. The found the pipe.  It had not collapsed but was full of mud and debris that went down the drain from the road.

Mission accomplished, sort of.  None of these fellows had been in the park with this dry well had been installed.  They could not believe that whoever had built this had filled it so full of rock. They hope that it will fine now. So do we.

They began to put things back together by putting soil into the hole. That confused me as they just shovelled dirt out.

New landscape cloth was laid and bit by bit it all came back together. They did say that it was impossible to level the cement slabs behind the fence. Colin said he had done it and expected it to be done. It took a while but did get it levelled.

They did a good job of cleaning up, better than I expected anyway. Our patio, the driveway and the street are covered with splotches of mud.  The fence has dirty handprints all over it.

I was called out for a final inspection. The wind was blowing and it was cold.  I didn’t have time to put a jacket on.

It looked good but not as perfect as it had been when we finished the big clean up last Saturday. The best part is that we did not have to take the fence part. We still need to wipe down the fence and the gate and move some of the landscape rock.  But other that putting the outdoor Christmas tree back to where it should go ( more or less ) we left it at that.

Colin went out to pick up Chinese take out for dinner. It is time to get back to our regularly scheduled life.  I took part of Friday off and all of Saturday to just sit and read most of the day. Today I am feeling more like myself. Hence this post which took a few hours to edit photos and write this synopsis. It really could have been worse but it was bad enough to shake me up. It has just been thirty days since we took the hedge out and it has not been an easy time. Time to get on with Christmas.

A very special belated Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers. I’m sorry but I totally forgot about your Thanksgiving. I hope that each one of you had a very special day and dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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